


wires crossed in the heart

by what_alchemy



Series: Sparklers on the Fourth of July [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:52:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky joins the army.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wires crossed in the heart

One by one, the fellas down at the docks where Bucky worked went off to war. 

“I gotta do my part,” Jumbo George had said. “My dad did his, and my granddad did his, and I ain’t got no business not serving my country too.”

“My number came up,” Pete Landser had said. “But I ain’t afraid, right? I was gonna join up anyway. Fuckin’ Nazis, man.”

“Besides, shit, when was I ever gonna see another country?” EJ Smalls had said. “It’ll be like… a vacation on Uncle Sam.”

Bucky kept her head down and hauled her haul. The guys cycled out; old timers who couldn’t qualify for military duty cycled in. More women began to trickle in too. They talked a lot about picking up the slack for the boys. They talked a lot period. Bucky had never had an easy time of it with other girls — it’s why she worked at the docks. It’s why she’d been attached at the hip with Steve since they were babies with shit in their pants. The guys were rough and they were always talking static, but Bucky could speak back at them with her sharp tongue, no harm done. Women — she didn’t know what to do with women’s talk.

“Everyone’s got a duty,” Janice said. “I couldn’t join the WAAC on account of I can’t type though. And this is outside, right? Better than breathing in poison at a factory. You ever read _The Jungle?_ ”

“Man, the WAACs is pencil pushers,” Bucky said. “If I’m gonna be a solider, I’m gonna be in the front lines with my eye in a sight.”

Whenever Bucky talked, the other dames stared until she went away. She learned to stop.

—

Another day, another 4F stamp for Steve.

Bucky came home from the docks on a warm spring night to find him out on the fire escape with his sketchbook and the defeated slope of his shoulders and she knew. Not that he’d been rejected — you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know no army would ever take his lungs, his heart, his flat feet — but that he’d tried again. 

She didn’t say anything. She just started a pot of pasta even though she never cooked, even though that was his job by mutual agreement over one of her burnt, inedible attempts at a meal many years ago. All she had for sauce was a bit of butter and cheese Steve must have picked up earlier, but it would have to do. 

Steve came in just in time to stop her from setting the building on fire. 

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, taking the pot off the burner as it began to bubble over. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Steve…”

“No, it’s my job. I should have been doing my job instead of feelin’ sorry for myself. You did yours all day, and that’s… good. My turn to take care of you, all right?”

“I just wanted to help.”

“I don’t need you to coddle me.” With that, he edged her out of the way to get to the sink, where he poured the contents of the pot into a strainer and shook it out. He muffled a curse when a drop splashed up on his hands, and he set the pot and strainer down. He braced his weight on his hands as he leaned over the sink, head hung low. 

Bucky came up slowly behind him and put her arms around his waist. She fitted her front to his back, pressed her nose into his neck, gave him a squeeze. He leaned his head back and sighed.

“Got another cartoon job,” he said. “ _The Daily Tribune._ ”

“That’s great, Steve.”

He shook his head.

“I should be out there. It’s not right, sitting around, doodling meaningless little pictures while other guys lay down their lives. The army has other jobs, you know, where it doesn’t matter about… all of this.” He made a vague gesture to himself, shoulders hitching. Bucky took a deliberate deep breath, taking in his scent. She turned her hands so her palms swept over his sides in a caress. He made to squirm, but she held him still.

“Don’t knock it, it’s mine,” she said lightly, and that earned her a begrudging snort of a laugh. “Steve. You’re not a codebreaker. You’re not a scientist, or an accountant. You’re… you’re an artist.” _And I love that about you, because I love everything about you_ didn’t manage to make it out.

Steve shook her off and took the pot to the table. He got one plate out, a fork and spoon, and put a generous helping of the pasta on it before pressing it into her hands. 

“I’m not hungry,” he said, and went back out onto the fire escape.

—

At work, Bucky found one of the new girls, Suzanne, huddled behind a crate crying into her knees. Bucky didn’t know what to do about crying people except get Darlene, who was an older dame and acted like everyone’s Ma.

“Yeah, shit,” Darlene said. She was moving a pallet and spat to the side. “Her beau just bit it in France. What can you do? I told her we’d cover for her today.”

Bucky’s heart stuttered, and her breath left her harshly, without her permission. _Thank you, Lord, for 4F stamps, for asthma and angina and swimmer’s ear._ Darlene paused, looked her up and down.

“Huh.”

“What?” Bucky snapped.

“Didn’t figure you for the fellas, if you don’t mind my saying. Your boy out there too?”

Bucky stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Darlene raised her hands and her eyebrow, placating. “Or your girl, don’t get me wrong. My niece, she’s like that, and I never held it against her none. And she knew the right doctor to go to, if you want in on the front. She’s in the Philippines now. Navy.”

Bucky frowned. “She’s on the front? How?”

Darlene took out a cigarette and leaned against a stack of pallets.

“Like I said. Knew the right doctor.” Her look turned assessing. “You interested?”

“No,” Bucky said, too quick. “No, I got people depending on me. I gotta… I gotta stay.”

She understood about duty. Steve felt it was his duty to go die alongside other men in a miserable trench somewhere like his father, like Bucky’s father. And it wasn’t that Bucky didn’t feel that same pull — she just felt it stronger when she looked at Steve. She couldn’t bear the thought of him in fatigues, not quick enough to outrun… anything. She would keep him here. She would pay for art school. She would secure their future. Any way she could.

“Right,” Darlene said. “Well, I didn’t say nothing, y’hear?”

“Of course not,” Bucky said. She wasn’t no rat.

“But if you ever need to make another choice, you know where I am.” Darlene jammed her cigarette between her teeth and sauntered off toward Suzanne.

—

That night, down at a dive bar not too far from her job, Bucky, Steve, and some of their friends from St. Augustine’s drank to Kenny Mendola, one of their own, fallen last week behind enemy lines. Bucky had a few too many, and Steve ended up having to prop her up and propel her home by his own power. He waved off anyone who tried to help and successfully dumped her into bed ten minutes later. He was taking her shoes off when Bucky said, “I coulda had his back, Steve.”

“You can’t protect everybody, Bucky.”

“Can protect you, though. That’s my job. That’s what I do.”

Steve didn’t respond, so she kept going.

“If we were on the front, Steve, I’d get ’em for you. Pop pop pop before they could get you.”

“I know.” He unbuttoned her shirt. 

“I’m glad you can’t go. I’m glad we ain’t toastin’ you tonight, ’cause we’ll never see you again. Need to see you again, Steve. Steve. My Steve.”

Steve’s breath was ragged as he peeled her out of her heavy uniform shirt.

“Shush,” he said softly.

“I take care of you. I’m the best at my job.”

“There’s no one else for it, Buck,” Steve said. Off came her trousers, her socks. “The absolute best.”

“I’m gonna lose you anyway.”

“What?”

“I’m losing you right now — all’s you can think of is this war that don’t want you. But I want you, Steve. You’re my one and only.”

“Bucky…”

“Kiss me?” 

Steve passed his lips softly, reverently, over her forehead, on her temple and cheekbone and jawline. Bucky craned her neck quick to plant one on his lips, but went dizzy at the movement. Steve eased her down, stroked her cheeks. 

“Go to bed, Buck. I love you.”

When she fell asleep, she dreamed of playing marbles with Kenny like they used to at the home. Kenny’s face was covered in blood, and soon, the marbles were, too. 

When she woke up, Steve was sleeping on her right arm, spine facing her in sharp relief. The way the bones pressed knobby against the skin of his back made her ache, begged for the press of her lips. She didn’t give in to the temptation. She listened to his whistling breath, the wheeze in the undertone. She thought of how they touched less, how some nights he couldn’t look at her, how she came home more and more often to a broody, angry man. He’d never take it out on her, he wasn’t like that and she wouldn’t stand for it anyway, but she was aware there was more than one way to lose a man. She was aware that she’d never once told him she loved him in the five years since they’d begun this, because the words got all stuck in her throat. 

She chewed at her nail and went over and over the decision she’d already made. Maybe he’d hate her for it, but at least she wouldn’t be around to watch him leave her first.

—

The doctor Darlene directed her to was a wizened old man whose face looked like a lemon rind left out to dry. His office was tucked into a labyrinth of alleyways in the Bronx, but inside was bright and clinically clean. He had her strip down to her smalls, then he looked her up and down as if he could see anything through those cataracts. He seemed generally unimpressed.

“Why should I do you this favor?” he said.

Bucky stood up straight, tipped her chin up and looked him in the eye. 

“Because I already got a boy’s name, and I might as well use it.”

“Try again, doll.”

“Because I can haul and aim and fight as good as any man, and I ain’t yellow, neither.”

“Again.”

Bucky didn’t know what to say. She had nothing left. She had no reasons, or she had too many, or they were too muddled. Or they sounded like a crock, because power of prayer or not, you couldn’t bargain with God. You couldn’t buy a life with your own. You couldn’t save a boy who’d never go off to war in the first place by sacrificing yourself. 

Eventually, she said, “Because I can help.”

The doctor asked her invasive questions about her menses and her bowel movements and listened to her heart and her lungs. He put her through the wringer with questions and prodding and whirlwind lessons on how to walk, talk, eat, drink, spit, shit like a man, but in the end, she got her 1A.

She hadn’t thought as far as what she’d say to Steve, so when the time came and went, she said nothing at all.

—

The night before she was set to get her orders, Steve asked her to marry him. Again.

She couldn’t bear it. She was the only woman he’d ever been with — the only one he _knew_ , really, because passing acquaintances in his classes or from the home barely counted. He was _grateful_ , and his devotion was the devotion of a man who thought he had no options. Bucky believed he loved her, but she wasn’t certain his love was more than stars in his eyes, a reflection of what she loved in him. Wires crossed in the heart. He loved because she did, not because of anything true to the core of James Buchanan Barnes. Besides, what man would love her unless he were obliged? Tall with no curves to speak of, shorn hair, incapable of walking in heels or putting on make-up. She hardly felt like a woman at all.

And, of course, he had no idea how she’d already betrayed him. He wouldn’t love her this time tomorrow.

She stubbed her cigarette out and flicked it off the fire escape. 

“You don’t wanna marry me, Steve,” she said. “You should stop asking.”

—

When Bucky climbed into bed that night, Steve tensed up and curled into himself tighter. She reached a hand out and, after a moment’s hesitation, laid it on his hip. His breath shuddered out of him.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” she said. “Can you look at me?”

There was a pause, and then a sigh, and he shuffled onto his other side. She met wary blue eyes and a mouth whose angry pinch did nothing to hide its fullness.

She dragged her knuckles down his cheek and cupped his jaw, thumb rubbing at stubble. He closed his eyes. He put his hand on her wrist, but didn’t pull her off.

“When are you gonna take me seriously, Bucky?” he whispered. “I’m not… I’m not some little boy who doesn’t know what he wants.”

“No,” Bucky said. “You’re my man.” And she kissed him slow and deep. His grip on her wrist tightened, but his mouth, his body gave way, and she slid herself over him, legs tangled, hips, stomachs, chests flush and heated. She pushed one leg of her cotton shorts to the side and pulled his down just enough for her to get him inside her.

Steve gasped. “Rubber!” he whispered.

“No,” she said. “No, I just got off the rag, it’s fine, Steve, please. Need you to come in me.”

He let out a shaky breath and let go of her wrist. 

“We could at least get our clothes off,” he said, but she shook her head. Something in her chest felt fragile and delicate, as if the slightest pull would tear it apart.

“Just be close,” she said. She watched his Adam’s apple bob, and then he nodded. She kissed him again, sucking at his lush bottom lip until he let out a quiet moan. He pitched into a roll that pulled her underneath him and made her grunt, but with the newfound leverage he snapped his hips into hers and made sparks cascade behind her eyelids. He drove into her and she rocked her hips up to meet each thrust until they were panting, sweating, shaking with effort. Steve’s rhythm began to stutter, and his eyes refused to stay open. He gasped her name and shoved her t-shirt up to get his mouth on her tits. Sparks burst along her spine and she tightened around the perfect girth of his cock inside her. She choked back a groan and dug her fingers into his hips to drive him into her with more force. He shoved one hand between them and up her shorts to rub frantically against her clitoris. He swallowed her strangled wail when she came spasming around him, and then he was coming too, body shuddering into hers as his hips jerked and his breath came hot on her neck. 

She rubbed her hand up and down his back in long strokes as he panted on top of her. She found she liked the weight of him pinning her down, even if her legs were confined by the shorts she still wore. She liked him, warm and solid against her, inside her. She liked him underneath her too, or curled against her in her arms, but for now, she wanted nothing more than the way he was fixing her to the mattress.

“I love you,” she said, quiet as she could, and she felt the way he trembled before he plundered her mouth with another kiss. She slid her hand down over the modest little curve of his ass and held him against her. “Stay in me,” she said, voice thick with a gathering humidity. “Stay with me.”

He only nodded and slid himself to the side. He pulled her hips along with him so she was only half under him, but his cock was still inside her and she was full of him. She was full up and wanted to keep this moment as if in amber. She felt his hands through her hair — probably smoothing it down, because he was fastidious and a little fussy and her heart felt swollen with love of him. Fingers trailed down her face, traced the lines of her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose, her jaw, her lips. He kissed her, soft and sweet. He laid his palm over the tiny curve of her breast and left it there. She savored how he loved her breasts. How he looked at her like she was all the constellations he never got to see. How he held her like a precious thing.

“I love you,” she said again.

“I love you too, Bucky,” he said. “So, so much. I love you.” 

“Don’t leave,” she said. 

“Never, never.”

She tangled a hand in the hair on the back of his head, and they lay like that together, forehead to forehead, breathing the same air, until they fell asleep.

—

With her breasts bound and a ball of socks in her briefs, Bucky became Sergeant James Barnes of the 107th infantry.

Later, after James Barnes was gone and there was only the Winter Soldier, she would wonder at the haze at the edge of her memory where a pair of blue eyes framed by dark lashes lived, where she felt content, where she felt warm, where she felt cherished. Where she _felt_.

The haze lasted only as long as it took to drift from waking to dreaming, and it always dissipated by morning.

 

**End**


End file.
